Her next appointment was at the beauty spa, and when she caught other women giving her a second look as she made her way there she guessed that they must be querying the elegance of her new hairstyle set against the shabbiness of her clothes and her make-up-free face.
She hated admitting it, but it was true that first impressions counted, and that people—especially women—judged members of their own sex by their appearance. The last thing she wanted was for the twins to be embarrassed by a mother other women looked down on. Even young children were very perceptive and quick to notice such things.
The spa and beauty salon was ahead of her. Taking a deep breath, Ruby held her head high as she walked in.
Two hours later, when she walked out again with the personal shopper who had come to collect her and help her choose a new wardrobe, Ruby couldn’t help giving quick, disbelieving glances into the mirrors she passed, still unable to totally believe that the young woman looking back at her really was her. Her nails were manicured and painted a fashionable dark shade, her eyebrows were trimmed, and her make-up was applied in such a subtle and delicate way that it barely looked as though she was wearing any at all. Yet at the same time her eyes looked larger and darker, her mouth fuller and softer, and her complexion so delicately perfect that Ruby couldn’t take her eyes off the glowing face looking back at her. Although she would never admit it to Sander, her makeover had been fun once she had got over her initial discomfort at being fussed over and pampered. Now she felt like a young woman rather than an anxious mother.
‘I understand you want clothes suitable for living on a Greek island, rather than merely holidaying there, and that your life there will include various social and business engagements?’ Without waiting for Ruby’s answer the personal shopper continued. ‘Fortunately we have got some of our new season stock in as well as several designers’ cruise collections, so I’m sure we shall be able to find everything you need. As for your wedding dress…’
Ruby’s heart leapt inside her chest. Somehow she hadn’t expected Sander to specify that she needed a wedding dress.
‘It’s just a very quiet registry office ceremony,’ she told the personal shopper.
‘But her wedding day and what she wore when she married the man she loves is still something that a woman always remembers,’ the other woman insisted.
The personal shopper was only thinking of the store’s profit, Ruby reminded herself. There was no real reason for her to have such an emotional reaction to the words. After all, she didn’t love Sander and he certainly didn’t love her. What she wore was immaterial, since neither of them was likely to want to look back in future years to remember the day they married. Her thoughts had produced a hard painful lump in her throat and an unwanted ache inside her chest. Why? She was twenty-three years old and the mother of five-year-old sons. She had long ago abandoned any thoughts of romance and love and all that went with those things, dismissing them as the emotional equivalent of chocolate—sweet on the tongue for a very short time, highly addictive and dangerously habit-forming. Best avoided in favour of a sensible and sustaining emotional diet. Like the love she had for her sons and the bond she shared with her sisters. Those were emotions and commitments that would last for a lifetime, whilst from what she had seen and heard romantic love was a delusion.
The twins were fascinated by the exhibits in the Natural History Museum. They had happily held Sander’s hand and pressed gratifyingly close to him for protection, calling him Daddy and showing every indication of being happy to be with him, so why did he feel so aware of Ruby’s absence, somehow incomplete? It was for the boys’ sake, Sander assured himself, because he was concerned that they might be missing their mother, nothing more.
Without quite knowing how it had happened, Ruby had acquired a far more extensive and expensive wardrobe than she had wanted. Every time she had protested or objected the personal shopper had overruled her—politely and pleasantly, but nonetheless determinedly—insisting that her instructions were that Ruby must have a complete wardrobe that would cover a wide variety of situations. And of course the clothes were sinfully gorgeous—beautifully cut trousers and shorts in cream linen, with a matching waistcoat lined in the same silk as the unstructured shirt that went with them, soft flowing silk dresses, silk and cotton tops, formal fitted cocktail dresses, along with more casual but still frighteningly expensive ‘leisure and beach clothes’, as the personal shopper had described them. There were also shoes for every occasion and each outfit, and underwear—scraps of silk and lace that Ruby had wanted to reject in favour of something far more sensible, but which somehow or other had been added to the growing rail of clothes described by the personal shopper as ‘must-haves’.
Now all that was left was the wedding dress, and the personal shopper was producing with a flourish a cream dress with a matching jacket telling Ruby proudly, ‘Vera Wang, from her new collection. Since the dress is short and beautifully tailored it is ideal for a registry office wedding, and of course you could wear it afterwards as a cocktail dress. It was actually ordered by another customer, but unfortunately when it came it was too small for her. I’m sure that it will fit you, and the way the fabric is pleated will suit your body shape.’
What she meant was that the waterfall of pleated ruching that was a feature of the cream silk-satin dress would disguise how thin she was, Ruby suspected.
The dress was beautiful, elegant and feminine, and exactly the kind of dress that a woman would remember wearing on her wedding day—which was exactly why she didn’t want to wear it. But the dresser was waiting expectantly.
It fitted her perfectly. Cut by a master hand, it shaped her body in a way that made her waist appear far narrower surely than it actually was, whilst somehow adding a feminine curvaceousness to her shape that made Ruby think she was looking at someone else in the mirror and not herself: the someone else she might have been if things had been different. If Sander had loved her?
Shakily Ruby shook her head and started to take the dress off, desperate to escape from the cruel reality of the image the mirror had thrown back at her. She could never be the woman she had seen in the mirror—a woman so loved by her man that she had the right to claim everything the dress offered her and promised him.
‘No. I don’t want it,’ she told the bewildered-looking personal shopper. ‘Please take it away. I’ll wear something else.’
‘But it was perfect on you…’
Still Ruby shook her head.
She was in the changing room getting dressed when the personal shopper reappeared, carrying a warm-looking, casually styled off-white parka.
‘I nearly forgot,’ she told Ruby, ‘your husband-to-be said that you had left your coat at home by accident and that you needed something warm to wear whilst you are in London.’
Wordlessly Ruby took the parka from her. It was lined with soft checked wool, and well-made as well as stylish.
‘It’s a new designer,’ the shopper told her. ‘And a line that we’re just trialling. She’s Italian, trained by Prada.’
Ruby bent her head so that the personal shopper wouldn’t see the emotion sheening her eyes. Sander might have protected her in public by pretending to believe that she had forgotten her coat, but in private he had humiliated her—because Ruby knew that he had guessed that she didn’t really possess a winter coat, and that she had been shivering with cold yesterday when they had walked in the park.
Walking back to the hotel wrapped in her new parka, Ruby reflected miserably that beneath the new hairstyle and the pretty make-up she was still exactly what she had been beforehand—they couldn’t change her, could not take away the burden of the guilt she still carried because of what she had once been. Expensive clothes were only a pretence—just like her marriage to Sander would be.
For her. Yes, but not for the twins. They must never know how she felt. The last thing she wanted was for them to grow up feeling that she had sacrificed herself for them. They must believe that she was happy.
She had intended to go straight to the suite, but the assessing look a woman in the lobby gave her, before smiling slightly to herself, as though she was satisfied that Ruby couldn’t compete with her, stung her pride enough to have her changing her mind and heading for the lounge instead.
A well-trained waitress showed her to a small table right at the front of the lounge. Ruby would have preferred to have hidden herself away in a dark corner, her brief surge of defiance having retreated leaving her feeling self-conscious and very alone. She wasn’t used to being on her own. Normally when she went out she had the twins with her, or one of her sisters.
When the waitress came to take her order Ruby asked for tea. She hadn’t eaten anything all day but she wasn’t hungry. She was too on edge for that.
The lounge was filling up. Several very smart-looking women were coming in, followed by a group of businessmen in suits, one of whom gave her such a deliberate look followed by a warm smile that Ruby felt her face beginning to burn.